Budget BurstNET VPS hosting (USA) based on personal experience

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In topics about German hosting from Hetzner and Server4You (by the way, the latter company has several more sites- be careful) people were interested, and why hosting in Germany? What we no longer know exactly in Russia, and if a project in the target audience has central and western Russia and / or Europe, then the choice of a German hosting service often turns out to be optimal in terms of price / quality / ping ratio. However, if your project is aimed at the United States or the whole world? I think that hosting from Hetzner is not very suitable here - this company, like almost all German hosting providers, focuses mainly on the domestic market, not caring about the availability of servers outside the country (very often in the case of Hetzner ping to Russia or generally server availability from Russia is being questioned), nor about good international support, at least in English (Hetzner now has this problem, they solved it and support is available in English, which is far from always the case with other German hosters - very often the site and support are in German). For service oriented to the most profitable - the American segment is desirable and American hosting and the possibility of "growth".

Because for almost a year our company has been a client of one of the American VPS hosting (we open a small free image hosting there - you can ping and check the work in every way), I want to talk about it by making some comparisons with the German hosting (forgive the hawkers, for comparing BurstNET VPS with experience using Hetzner's Dedicated server - the weight categories are different, but the experience with Hetzner is based on renting a dedicated server).

BurstNET - its pros, cons and features.


This hoster has 2 tariff lines - regular VPS (with a port of 100MBPS) and premium VPS with a 1GBPS port, reduced server load and with memory, the size of which at peaks can increase by 2 times. On average, premium rates are 2-3 times more expensive, so there wasn’t much need for them for us. All tariffs initially include 2 IP addresses, and additional ones can be purchased separately. Additional options also include external backup media (at the price of a separate VPS, by the way, so their value is doubtful - it’s better to take another VPS and duplicate them to each other), SSL certificate, additional space (also not profitable - it is much better to take VPS more powerful) on disks or additional traffic.

The tariff we use is: CPU 1500MHZ, RAM 1GB, HDD 50GB (RAID), 1000GB traffic costs $ 9.95 - i.e. its price level is at the level of a conventional shared hosting (there is a tariff and cheaper, but it cannot be considered for any serious things). The comparable Hetzner VQ 7 tariff has half the memory and more than half the hard drive (20GB). If you consume 1TB of traffic from Hetzner - you will forever cut off the speed to 10MBPS - at that speed next month you will naturally not spend anything anymore no matter how you try (returning 100 megabytes will cost 6.90 €), with BurstNET - you will have to pay the so-called “Extra Bandwidth” - this is from $ 0.5 to $ 0.05 per gigabyte, depending on the amount of overrun. Which of these two policies is better - each one decides for himself (we have never had an overrun while working with these hosting services), and here is the time to approach the very significant advantage of BurstNET - the ability to “upgrade” the tariff is something that is not provided for Hetzner nor Server4You. Those. you don’t need to take the tariff “for growth” - you are now taking the minimum, and then, with the growth of the project, switch to an increasingly expensive and powerful one.

The ceiling (the most serious tariff) for BurstNET is $ 49.95 (CPU 4000MHZ, RAM 4GB, HDD 250GB (RAID), traffic 4000GB) on a regular VPS and $ 99.95 (CPU 5000MHZ, RAM guaranteed 4GB / increase up to 8GB, HDD 250GB (RAID), traffic 6000GB, 1GBPS port) on premium plans. There are a total of 6 tariffs in each of the lines, so “growing” is where the most expensive VPS is - it’s almost a tariff with the characteristics of a Dedicated server.

So, having bought hosting from BurstNET (the bill was paid through PayPal and there were no problems with this), I had to wait a day for the setup, because it happens manually. By the way, then our first contact with support occurred, which quite intelligibly explained why VPS is not available right now and when to wait for its setup / installation. After installing VPS, a letter arrived informing us that the server was installed, its parameters, passwords and links are indicated. As a panel, we used free vePortal (you can order separately cPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk, but it was completely unnecessary for us), with a nice interface, but with an absolute minimum of functions like shutting down, rebooting, and creating backups.

Debian was installed on the VPS (the distributor can be chosen from Centos, Ubunta, Fedora, Debian and Gentoo) - there were no features or troubles with this, and there is no particular need to stop there. The speed to the server was normal, ping was acceptable (140-180ms - we saw pings from the USA and much worse).
The server uptime is quite decent - for a year there were several small problems with the server being unavailable (for several minutes), once the server crashed and once something happened to BurstNET itself - their site lay for several hours, there was no access to VPS, but probably that it was a problem with routing and I admit the idea that there were no problems with access from the USA.

Traffic overrun on VPS

Everything went well until vePortal testified that I discovered a terrible traffic overrun already at the beginning of the month (monthly traffic was indicated as 8.5TB, which in terms of tariffs meant a completely non-childish amount), despite the fact that the site that was on this VPS generated a miserable debugged traffic. We immediately wrote off the problem to tech support and rushed to double-check the scripts and logs to understand where it all came from. After 3 hours, support answered and reassured that yes, they know about this problem in vePortal and that I did not pay attention to it:
This is a known bug within veportal. We are currently working with them to get this fully resolved. Unfortunately, there is no estimated time of this to be completely resolved. I recommend installing MRTG for up to date graphs. Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.

That's all the problems with this hosting that happened during the year - given its price, you can’t even talk about it - the support proved to be quite adequate and sane on simple issues, but we have not yet encountered serious problems.

Not quite obvious advantages of working with Americans from BurstNET


  • for all the time we contacted support we never encountered holidays / weekends / non-working hours - we always answered relatively quickly and to the point (this applies not only to BurstNET - I admit that this is just a feature of many American companies);
  • the real server equipment in the racks is full-fledged servers, not desktop towers, as in Hetzner (this item only makes sense if you compare budget hosting services);
  • no installation board (compared to the same Hetzner - this is a pretty useful plus);
  • payment via PayPal with all its additional benefits and guarantees (you can pay with a card, but I don’t see much point in this);
  • referral program (not everyone needs it, but some will be able to significantly reduce their hosting fees);
  • such a thing as the Firewall Security Service should in principle help (if not save) DDoS - you haven’t tried it yourself, so it’s hard to say how it works (and whether it works at all) - it’s quite possible that marketing is pure water;
  • allowed by adult (specified specifically), and although not everyone needs it, but if you have a UGC project, you better play it safe: in Germany everything is strict - and they won’t talk if one of your users wants to share with the rest of the strawberries - such is the law there;
  • before buying and paying for VPS, you can search for discount coupons - for BurstNET there are coupons at a 25% discount, which will be beneficial when paying for VPS, for example, for a year.

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